


Wretched

by HVK



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Incredible Hulk - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Despair, Friendship, Gen, Hatred, Introspection, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-19
Updated: 2014-06-19
Packaged: 2018-02-05 07:53:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1810921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HVK/pseuds/HVK
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers saw the first Frankenstein movie when it was made. He read the book and still wonders why everyone thinks of the Creature as a dumb brute when it was only a person, driven to hate and revenge by being rejected by all the world and everything in it. Now when he looks at Bruce Banner and the Hulk, he remembers that story, and wonders how badly the Hulk hurts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wretched

**Author's Note:**

> I honestly like Hulk more than Bruce Banner, and I adore the comparision of him to Frankenstein's Monster. With that in mind (and some thought regarding the Green Scar era), this eventually developed.
> 
> The title, incidentally, is a reference to Promethean: The Created; one of the lineages of their kind are the Frankensteins, also known as the Wretched. It seemed appropriate for Hulk as well.
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't own any Marvel properties or likenesses thereof.

The screen flickers, distorted by poor camera quality (those kids with the phones did their best, but its not  _quite_ what he would have liked), and he watches.

There is, before clear picture, legible audio. And it is loud, and unlike anything he has ever heard in all his life; the Chitauri's screeching, for all their essential alien character, had more in common with a man's than this noise. It is roaring, pure and simple, loud beyond what words can convey and simultaneously shooting up dozens of meters up one scale or another, distorted not by bad sound reception but a throat swollen with emotions both alien in their extremity and all too human in their essence.

Captain Steve Rogers knows what this kind of roaring is, this screaming. It's _pain._

And he listens, to the nearly mindless rage echoing through the speakers. He puts his hands together, listening, and he has seen too many battlefields in his time. He knows the face and names of horrors. The sounds of pain, the howls of the dying, the inarticulate begging for help like beasts shouting.

He saw the worst of Hydra’s works first hand. He was there when they liberated the concentration camps (and the memory of a young boy sticks out in his head, hair already turning silver and metal following him like light after an angel, and he wonders what became of that boy). He knows evil, and he knows good, but Steve Rogers knows what pain sounds like.

Now. He leans close, listens well, and watches the recordings of the Hulk’s rampages. Metal cracks and bullets pound and the battlefield is drowned out by the Hulk’s screaming, the roaring-

_His_ roaring. Not its roaring, like the people who would have talked about the Hulk before. Sometimes Steve Rogers thinks about why they call the Hulk an ‘it’. A thing, a beast. A monster.

Because he knows what pain sounds like. What it sounds like when someone is hurt, is in pain, is screaming for all the world to just make it _stop._ And he sees it magnified, concentrated, and open upon the Hulk’s face and in his voice.

The worst anger, he thinks, the most powerful, comes from suffering and loss.

He watches the recordings. And he thinks about the time he saw a monster shuffling on the screen, pursued by a mob; a creation hated by the world solely because it existed, and to live the end of all his days loved by no one and intimately familiar with rejection from every living thing. Steve Rogers loved the movie Frankenstein, had loved the original novel, and now he always wondered why a lot of people thought the monster was the villain and not a victim who became angry beyond sanity.

He still wonders why.

And now, he wonders if Bruce Banner has ever read _Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,_ or if it wounds him too badly to read of a monster created by circumstances and shunned and hunted, until at last turning to revenge. If man would not accept him, he would not accept man.

Now, now. Captain Steve Rogers remembers the look on the Hulk’s face when he spoke to him - alert, intense, eyes glowing faint green, and most of all _intelligent_ \- and he wonders if that had been the first time that a stranger had ever spoken to the Hulk with anything but disdain and fear or hate.

He closes his eyes. He thinks of the Creature from the book, the one demonized and reduced to a mindlessly simple brute in the movies but in the original fiction... such an eloquent man, and so relentlessly full of hate for the injustices heap upon them, driven to visit them all upon the creator who abandoned him to suffer alone.

_("If any being felt emotions of benevolence towards me, I should return them a hundred and a hundredfold; for that one creature's sake I would make peace with the whole kind!")  
_

And then he thinks of Hulk, recklessly using his own body to save countless humans from peril. People who otherwise might well have hated him, now regarding him as a hero. He wonders what that says about Hulk, and Bruce Banner. Because so many talk about them as though they were distinct entities (as does Banner himself) but he is not so sure.

Bruce and the Hulk were both victims. They, together, were the monster. Steve often thought that Bruce would be much more at peace with himself if he accepted that the Hulk was _not_ a monstrous alter ego, not some thing he could carve out of himself or steer like a bomb falling. He simply was just Banner loosed and given voice to the rage inside.

Sometimes, he asks himself just _how_ close both Banner and Hulk were to turning in on themselves, and finally declaring that if the world would reject him, than he would reject the world and turn his wrath upon all who hated him.

Steve wonders what it says about the Hulk that he, for all his fury and instinctual brutality, never did.


End file.
